During the drilling of either vertical or horizontal wells for resource exploration and/or recovery, various drilling fluids, i.e., drilling muds, are employed to maintain well integrity and to clear the core hole of crushed material generated by the drilling process. This geological material generated by the drilling process can be analyzed to understand the structure and content of the material being drilled through.
One conventional method for analyzing the geological material includes sending core samples from a well site to an offsite device for analysis. These offsite devices are typically large and not suitable for delivery and use at most, if any, marine and/or land well sites. Some of these devices can collect and measure visible through short wave infrared light reflected off of these core samples. Prior to analyzing these core samples, various processing steps typically are required, such as, grinding the core samples down into very fine samples. Alternatively, on site analysis devices are typically limited in the scope of measurements and observations that can be taken as compared to the larger, offsite devices.
Another technology which has more recently been introduced for the analysis of core samples and cuttings is Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (DRIFTS). DRIFTS uses an infrared light which can be reflected off or transmitted through a prepared sample prior to the light being measured by a detector, the measurement being of total bond vibrations. Regarding the samples used in DRIFTS, the sample particle size has been reduced to reduce spectra effects.
Therefore, currently available systems and methods for analyzing the geological samples obtained from drilling have various limitations such as time delay associated with transmitting sample for analysis using an offsite device, limited capabilities from currently used on-site devices, and/or additional sample processing steps to be performed prior to being analyzed.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods that avoid the afore-mentioned drawbacks.